Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love by Huma Qureshi review – tales of everyday tragedy

Huma Qureshi has the perfect title for her short story collection. Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love strikingly encapsulates a major theme of the book: the inability to communicate honestly with the most important people in your life. Qureshi’s stories keenly identify the everyday tragedies of feeling profoundly unknown or unheard, of holding secrets and misunderstandings.

Formerly a writer for the Observer and the Guardian, Qureshi published a memoir, How We Met, earlier this year about dating men her parents considered marriage material, before falling in love with a white British man. Her own story could slot neatly into this, her first fiction anthology.

Qureshi’s stories feature a cast of – mostly – youngish women of Pakistani heritage, often struggling with overbearing, judgmental and oppressive mothers, blindly insensitive male partners, or both. These tales vividly capture the experience of feeling constrained by family expectations, but also of not quite fitting the norms of British culture either.

The terrain can get repetitive; this dilemma is usually felt by women who’ve left behind immigrant communities for a white, middle-class London milieu; there are many writers and journalists. Pressure points recur, too: in several stressful holidays, tolerable relationships become intolerable. And occasionally, the responses to monstrous mothers tip into melodrama; although it won the Harper’s Bazaar 2020 short story prize, I didn’t quite buy the murderous intent in The Jam Maker.

But usually, Qureshi takes the reader plausibly inside the inner recesses of characters’ hearts and minds. Premonition beautifully recalls the intensity of a first crush, developed via “a private symphony of glances”, before a bewildering first kiss leads to disaster. And she captures how such incidents can, in adulthood, seem insignificant and still life-defining.

One of the strongest stories – and surely the most heartbreaking – takes the perspective of one of Qureshi’s forceful mothers, Shaheen, who remains oblivious to how she smothers her daughter. The author renders her incomprehension painfully acute, while allowing the reader to see the big picture Shaheen misses.

There is, however, a tendency to spell out her characters’ feelings – needlessly, given we can easily read them between the otherwise well-crafted lines. She also occasionally overdoes the similes, but it would be hard to argue for much paring back when there are so many striking images to relish. A strung-out mother’s eyes feel “as thin as paper from sleeplessness, as though if she rubbed them too hard they might accidentally rip apart”. A hot summer is “as perfectly formed as a china tea set”. A grieving lover tastes their partner in “the glue of my raw morning mouth”. It all bodes well for Qureshi’s forthcoming novel, about – what else? – “family, belonging and identity”.

Holly Williams’s debut novel, What Time Is Love?, is published by Orion next year

• Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love by Huma Qureshi is published by Sceptre (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply